After some calls to PR firm (John Vonder Harr at Seyferth & Associates) and to Stephen J. Markee, the President and CEO of I/NET, I finally got to speak with Mr. Markee for about 45 minutes. The following is from the note I took during our conversation. I intend to do more research on this company and write a summary late to share with people who are interested in this company. I would appreciate any help in the research process. I still have a lot of questions. For example, although I consider myself an experienced UNIX and NT administrator and programmer, I don't know much about IBM AS/400. Therefore, it's hard for me to estimate how well AS/400 will do competing with UNIX and NT in internet server market, and it's hard for me tell whether Mr. Markee's estimation of 25000 to 50000 AS/400E sales per year is too conservative or too optimistic. Opinion from people familiar with AS/400 would really help.
(1) Main Products:
I asked about the retail price of I/NET's main products (in order to estimate earnings). Here is what I got.
I/NET's main products includes MERCHANT/400 (retail price $15,000, must be used with Commerce Server/400 ), COMMERCE/400 (retail price $4995), WEBSERVER/400 (retail price $2995) and WEBULATOR/400 (retail price $2995).
Netscape SuiteSpot server products will be ported by I/NET to AS/400 and will be released on the end of July. The first one coming out will be the Enterprise Server. The price is not set yet.
(2) The Market for I/NET's Main Products
I/NET's main products are specifically for IBM AS/400 users. There are about half million AS/400 users worldwide. The new AS/400E, mainly targeted at network server market, is expected to sell between 25,000 to 50,000 units per year. The ported Netscape products will be for the new RISC based AS/400E with V4R2. The current worldwide AS/400 market is illustrated below:
US and Canada: 30%
Europe: 45%
Asia: 20% (with 80% of users in Japan)
Other: 5%
I/NET just recently started sales to Asia (mainly Japan) market.
Competing with I/NET ported Netscape server products in AS/400 market will be Lotus Domino suite, which is more complex and requires large resource to get it up and running. Hence it is mainly for large corporations. Also note that Domino suite will marketed by Lotus while I/NET's products will be marketed by International Marketing Strategies (IMS) as well as IBM marketing channels. Another interesting note is that although IBM has its own 5250 Emulation product, it now recommend Webulator/400 to its users.
(3) Other Products and Services
Recently, I/NET lunched Career/Net. It is marketed by a Miami company. Customers signed up so far include Citibank and pageNet.
I/NET is also doing consulting business. For example, it designed IBM's AS/400 web site and has just extended its contract with IBM to maintain that site.
yongzhi
|
